Items tagged with ethereum
If you woke up one morning to millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency in your account, would your first thoughts be about returning the money from whence it came? It's something to ponder, but regardless hundreds if not thousands of users on the Compound Finance platform found themselves in this moral predicament after a bug deposited random amounts of COMP into their accounts. Compound, or COMP, is an ERC-20 asset "that empowers community governance of the Compound protocol; COMP token-holders and their delegates debate, propose, and vote on all changes to the protocol." This community-driven protocol then provides a "free and open financial infrastructure running on the Ethereum blockchain,"...
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Late last month, we saw the first images of an alleged Navi 21-based RDNA 2 cryptocurrency mining card. Although we couldn't determine what exact GPU was being used, Navi 21-based Radeon RX cards have Ethereum hash rates ranging from 61 MH/s for the Radeon RX 6800 to 65 MH/s for the Radeon RX 6900 XT. Now, another dedicated RDNA 2 cryptomining card has appeared, and it's apparently based on the Navi 22 GPU. Navi 22 is used in the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card for those unfamiliar with AMD's GPU nomenclature. According to the information provided alongside the images, this card features a passive, fanless cooling system and we spy an XFX logo above the PCIe 4.0 connector. For those keeping scores,...
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Late last year, when we first heard about the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, it was rumored that the card would debut with 20GB of GDDR6X memory. However, at launch, the card instead featured 12GB of GDDR6X compared to 10GB for the standard GeForce RTX 3080. Apparently, there was some truth to those early rumors, as someone in Russia obtained a Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC 20G that somehow made it onto the retail market. The card came from a retailer in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a price tag of 225,000 rubles (around $3,100) versus a $1,199 asking price for the standard GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. There are some interesting differences between the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti that officially...
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There is a lot of blame to go around for the current dearth of graphics cards available in the retail channel. Despite companies like NVIDIA and AMD pumping out record numbers of GPUs, incredible demand still results in shortages that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says will continue through 2022. There's also a lot of activity in the cryptomining world, as Ethereum miners have flocked to GeForce RTX 30 Series Ampere cards due to their favorable hash rate performance. With this in mind, an allegedly new -- and previously unannounced -- NVIDIA CMP HX dedicated Ethereum mining card has been spotted in the wild. The new CMP 170HX is reportedly based on the potent A100 accelerator. According to hardware...
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It seems unreal that GPU inventories are still short for enthusiasts nearly a year after the release of the GeForce RTX 30 and Radeon RX 6000. Some gamers have been lucky enough to purchase new graphics cards at MSRP via promotions like the Newegg Shuffle or Best Buy's in-store GeForce events. Still, others have caved to paying over retail at third-party marketplaces like eBay. So, the video embedded below is sure to anger the millions of hardware gamers out there that fought tooth and nail to obtain a GeForce RTX 3080 or a Radeon RX 6800 XT. The video shows stacks upon stacks of boxed AMD graphics cards from various board partners in a stockroom. Slowing the video down, we spied Radeon RX 6700...
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NVIDIA addressed the Ethereum market earlier this year with the launch of Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) HX Series cards. The company also locked down its latest mainline GeForce RTX 30 cards with a Light Hash Rate (LHR) mining limiter. Now, it’s alleged that AMD is looking to get in on the dedicated Ethereum mining market with headless versions of its RDNA 2 graphics cards. Images of this alleged cryptomining card were taken by a local Vietnamese PC hardware retailer, and they show a dual-slot design with an unadorned blower-style cooler. Instead of the standard outputs you’d see on modern graphics cards (HDMI, DisplayPort, etc.), the I/O plate is dominated by exhaust vents to help...
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Some kids do extra household chores, open up lemonade or baked goods stands, or recycle bottles to earn a bit of cash. Others get involved in cryptocurrency mining. Two siblings in Frisco, Texas have started their own cryptocurrency mining company and are making more than $30,000 a month. Fourteen year old Ishaan Thakur and nine year old Aanya Thakur began mining for cryptocurrency this past March. They originally were interested in investing in cryptocurrency, but could not afford to do so. They therefore set up an old gaming computer in their garage with the help of their father and YouTube tutorials to begin mining. They originally were going to mine for Bitcoin, but were worried that...
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One of AMD's add-in board partners, Sapphire, appears to have released a graphics card for cryptocurrency mining that is equipped with not one, but two Radeon RX 570 GPUs, if a new leak is not pulling our collective legs. Sapphire has made no such announcement, mind you, possibly because it wants to keep the release on the down low. That would be understandable, considering that crypto-mining is at least contributing to the general unavailability of graphics cards. Releasing a mining card in the midst of it all could be frowned upon by some gamers, and Sapphire may not want to attract that kind of ire. Which again, assumes this leak is legitimate in the first place. A regular Radeon RX 570 is...
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Yesterday, criminal hackers stole approximately $600 million in varying cryptocurrencies from the PolyNetwork, a blockchain interoperability company. Now, in an interesting turn of events, the hackers have begun returning the stolen funds in what was to be one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts ever. As it stands, cryptocurrencies all have their standalone networks, which means that going between them would be difficult at best. However, PolyNetwork aims to interconnect Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others through smart contracts and interconnections between other crypto chains. Interestingly, malicious hackers were reportedly able to exploit a vulnerability in the EthCrossChainManager contract and...
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Is AMD's newly minted Radeon RX 6600 XT the most efficient cryptocurrency mining graphics card ever produced? It is probably too early to tell (considering the card only released to retail today), but according to a set of cryptocurrency mining hash rates and energy consumption figures posted to Reddit, it is the efficiency champ. If you have not done so already, be sure to check out our Radeon RX 6600 XT review. We do not get into mining performance, but you will otherwise find plenty of gaming and graphics benchmarks, including a varied range of DirectX and Vulkan titles. We also evaluate the card's real-time ray tracing prowess and overclocking potential. What about mining performance, though?...
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As the user base for cryptocurrency grows, so too do politicians and regulators looking to stymie the situation due to taxation and illicit activity concerns. Now, President Biden has backed a plan to tax proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum via an amendment to a major bill advancing in the U.S. Senate. The amendment that would change taxing for decentralized finance (DeFi) owners was brought up by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Mark Warner (D-VA) in a cross-aisle move. The change would provide tax reporting exemptions to validators and developers attached to proof-of-work (PoW) networks like Bitcoin, leaving proof-of-stake (PoS) and other types of networks in the cold. Senators...
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It appears that illegal electricity theft and cryptocurrency mining go hand in hand, as the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reported that it has shut down a massive crypto-farm stealing electricity. Comprised of thousands of consoles and hundreds of graphics cards, the farm was seized from an old warehouse professionally rigged for the illicit activities. In the city of Vinnytsia, a group of crypto miners has been accused of “theft of water, electricity or thermal energy through its unauthorized use,” by the SBU. According to the report, “electricity meters that did not show a real energy consumption” were used to steal upwards of $259,000 in electricity monthly for the...
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In early May, MSI delivered its first Ethereum mining card from NVIDIA’s Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP HX) GPU family. The headless card was called the CMP 30HX Miner XS and is based on the GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU. This time around, however, MSI is moving up the performance ladder in the CMP family with the launch of the CMP 50HX Miner. Whereas the CMP 30HX has an Ethereum hash rate of just 26 MH/sec, the CMP 50HX is more performant at 45 MH/sec. According to MSI, the CMP 50HX Miner features 3,584 CUDA cores, a base clock of 1,350MHz, a boost clock of 1,545MHz, and 10GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps on a 320-bit bus. It’s reported that the CMP 50HX is based on the TU102...
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In May, China began a cryptocurrency crackdown that kicked off a mass exodus of digital miners from the country. Since then, this crackdown has continued and even been reaffirmed as of late with several major mines' shutdown. This has put cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum into a tailspin, and it is hard to tell where this will end. In the past two months, Bitcoin has lost over 40% of its value, and some investors are rightfully concerned. With this loss, analysts report that Bitcoin has formed a "death cross," which means the average price over the last 50 days fell below its 200-day moving average. According to Investopedia, this is sometimes viewed as a signal that a massive sell-off...
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NVIDIA is hoping that applying a hash rate limiter to some of its graphics cards will help get more units in the hands of actual PC gamers, rather than miners, who the company is serving with CMP HX parts. The newly minted GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is one of those cards. It is not a great option for mining Ethereum (relative to the card's cost), and it looks like the hash rate limiter nerfs a few other cryptocurrencies as well. Hopefully this attempt works out better than it did for the GeForce RTX 3060. NVIDIA attempted to gimp mining performance for that card as well, but the effort was quickly undone when a developer driver that removed the hash rate limiter found its way to the web. It did not...
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We're just days away from the official unveiling of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, which means that leaks are occurring more frequently. Earlier this morning, we were made privy to the [alleged] full specifications of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. We're now learning about how its Ethereum mining performance has been nerfed compared to previous Ampere graphics cards. While the GeForce RTX 3090 currently sits at the top of the stack in NVIDIA's Ampere lineup with its 10,496 CUDA cores and 24GB GDDR6X memory, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is no slouch. According to GPU-Z, it features 10,240 CUDA cores, 12GB GDDR6X memory, a base clock of 1365MHz, and a boost clock of 1665MHz. As such, the GeForce...
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NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 was the first Ampere graphics card to introduced a cryptocurrency limiter. In early testing, the limiter gradually reduced the hash rate of the GPU arm around 41 MH/s to 26 MH/s or lower, in the hopes of making them less attractive to Ethereum miners. However, enthusiasts quickly found multiple workarounds to defeat the limiter, restoring its original mining performance. NVIDIA is back again with Lite Hash Rate (LHR) GPUs, and the folks over at Expreview have gotten their hands on the Zotac GeForce RTX 3060 LHR Apocalypse GOC, which is exclusive to the Chinese market. According to the site, which performed a wide variety of real-world gaming and synthetic benchmarks,...
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It has been a tumultuous week for cryptocurrencies as many of the major coins have taken a nosedive off a cliff, such as Bitcoin sitting at $34,000 at the time of writing. As this is happening, many crypto exchanges, like Binance and Coinbase, are feeling the pressure and may be struggling for it. Citing issues like network congestion and partial outages, these companies temporarily paused transactions, either by choice or involuntarily but have now restored some service. Earlier this morning, Coinbase faced “intermittent downtime” on its platforms, tweeting that some customers were “experiencing some issues with logging in, seeing their balances, and trading.” The initial...
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Hey, good news everyone—the GPU shortage is over! Just kidding, you still can't find a graphics card in stock (not from a first-party seller at a fair price, that is). I know, I know, what an insensitive intro, my apologies. However, there is actually some good news, related to GPUs. Ethereum is aiming to become much more power efficient, and a key change to its operations could dramatically reduce the demand for graphics cards. That is the big upside in theory, anyway. Ethereum is embarking on a transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model. What exactly does that mean? Well, the main benefit outlined in a blog post announcing the change is a massive 99.95 percent...
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Gigabyte yesterday jumped the gun when it comes to its announcement of Lite Hash Rate (LHR) GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards. While NVIDIA’s beta 466.24 driver released late last month confirmed that new GPU revisions were on the way, there was no mention of the LHR terminology at that time. Today, however, NVIDIA officially confirmed that its new LHR GPUs will now ship in late May. While the cryptocurrency limiter was first introduced on the GeForce RTX 3060, the new LHR series will extend to the GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. All these new LHR cards will have software/hardware controls implemented to slash the Ethereum hash rate in half compared to previous...
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Gigabyte today made its new Lite Hash Rate (LHR) GeForce RTX 3060 cards official. We've heard about upcoming GPU revisions for the GeForce RTX 30 Series with a second-generation Ethereum limiter onboard, but Gigabyte is among the first to post actual product pages confirming the change. NVIDIA's GeForce 466.24 driver confirmed that this change was on the way, stating, "This driver updates the hash limiter for the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB and is required for product shipped starting mid-May." Gigabyte's LHR series is currently limited to its GeForce RTX 3060 family, which includes the following cards: Aorus GeForce RTX 3060 ELITE 12G GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING OC 12G GeForce RTX 3060 VISION OC 12G GeForce...
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Meme coins have been on the rise, with Dogecoin taking off and other cryptocurrencies attempting to follow suit. This has caused some trouble for the rest of the cryptocurrency world as fees have gone up and the legitimate cryptocurrency market is diluted. Now, one of the cofounders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has donated $1 billion in meme coins to a COVID-19 relief fund for India, which may have rippling effects. While Buterin donated quite a bit to other charities, the big donation of the bunch is 500 Ethereum, and a whopping 50 trillion SHIB worth roughly $1.14 billion at the time of the transaction was sent to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund. The founder of this fund, Sandeep Nailwal,...
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